In some states dragging their feet on supporting independent practice and chaining them to more onerous doctor oversight/collaboration requirements vs NP. I'm referring to doctors with/of influence in the medical board.
NP are under the nursing board so doctors are less entrenched in their influence.
Letting NPs practice independently as doctors is increasingly viewed as a mistake, not a model that should be emulated more widely.
There are a lot of problems coming out of the fact that NPs are now basically practicing medicine in parallel with doctors despite vastly different education and training experience.
Many patients don’t even understand the difference. It doesn’t matter for common things like a simple sprain or common cold usually, but cases of medication overprescribing (think antibiotics for colds, etc) are commonly traced back to NPs and specialists will complain about the deluge of incorrect referrals from NPs who don’t know what they’re doing.
One example: I heard a specialist explain that they had to stop taking referrals for Ehlers-Danlos evaluation from NPs because the local NPs were referring people at impossibly high rates due to misdiagnosis. Ehlers-Danlos has become a popular (though incorrect) TikTok diagnosis for vague symptoms and rather than push back, many local NPs were running with it. Social media is full of people who are convinced they have Ehlers-Danlos and a lot of NPs were leaning into the trend instead of realizing that it’s not real.
> I'm referring to doctors with/of influence in the medical board.
So your unqualified statement refers to a specific and very small proportion of doctors.
I'm extremely grateful that APCs have independent practice in my system. There is way too much work to be done compared to the number of physicians available to do it.
The "working under a doctor" model seems to be mostly encouraged by the administrators, as this puts impossibly high liability on the physician (who is forced to "oversee" a dozen or more APCs).
